Hello, I am just curious on what people's thoughts are. Some say that people from Earth are already in contact with ET etc.. But regardless of that, when do you personally THINK that we will make official contact with ET? Any guesses? Guesses dont have to be based on facts.... just random guesses... I think, maybe between 2010 and 2040.. :)

Soon...we are looking as we speak so if they look for us, we will hear. But I doubt that it will happen in my lifetime, and I am 26."By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible". Hebrews 11.3

After the Allen ATA is fully commissioned and operational, I think we will pick up an ET signal very soon, if there is a planet close enough to us radiating.
As regards them contacting us, not for a very long time.

Currently we are looking away from the center of the galaxy, if we looked towards the center we would have a much better, thousands, millions of times better chance.

Need some serious scopes in the southern hemisphere.

My guess is never. :( Hope I'm wrong.

hi Graeme - do you think Australia would be willing to lease out some land in order to aassist this cause? How about placing telescopes (and a hotel) on the top of Ayers rock? I can't believe we're looking in the wrong direction! I suddenly feel a little deflated! haha

Currently we are looking away from the center of the galaxy, if we looked towards the center we would have a much better, thousands, millions of times better chance.

Need some serious scopes in the southern hemisphere.

My guess is never. :( Hope I'm wrong.

hi Graeme - do you think Australia would be willing to lease out some land in order to aassist this cause? How about placing telescopes (and a hotel) on the top of Ayers rock? I can't believe we're looking in the wrong direction! I suddenly feel a little deflated! haha

Hello, I am just curious on what people's thoughts are. Some say that people from Earth are already in contact with ET etc.. But regardless of that, when do you personally THINK that we will make official contact with ET? Any guesses? Guesses dont have to be based on facts.... just random guesses... I think, maybe between 2010 and 2040.. :)

The original founders of SETI thought there would be contact in about 30 years. That time has come and gone but not too long ago. I don't know the exact dates. If you want, I could find out for you.

For me, after reading about the new array that is either on board or ready to fire away this year. The director of this latest equipment stuck his neck out and intimated that it would be this year, 2007. (at least that is the impression that I got from reading the article. I remember being totally shocked that he would commit to that). Therefore, I am going to say in the next FIVE years!! Oh God, I hope so, but I do believe this is a decent calculated guess. So there you have it from a true neophyte.

I basically agree with you; you and I are not too far apart on our speculations.It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge. --- Enrico Fermi ---

I have to ask you. Probably never because we will "blow" ourselves up first, or because the odds are just to insurmountable.It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge. --- Enrico Fermi ---

I have to ask you. Probably never because we will "blow" ourselves up first, or because the odds are just to insurmountable.

Time and distance.

We have been been on the scene for a fraction of 1% of the life of the earth, and been detectable for a much smaller time. Assuming the ratios are about the same for ETIs aligning those windows up is a very low probability event.

Space is huge, it is very hard to get a real grasp of just how big. One illustration that helped me alot is if the Sun were the size of one of the periods on this screen the earth would not be close enough to it to also be on the screen. A complete model of our solar system at that scale would be measured in city blocks, possibly kilometers. At that scale the closest star would be farther away than man has ever traveled before. Intensity of electromagnetic radiation decreases at the square of the distance, so anything we are currently capable of detecting would have to be created with a huge amount of energy for us to detect it.

edit: This does not mean that I think we should stop looking, if we do not look we definately will not find anything. Rather we need to have the patience to keep looking for centuries.BOINC WIKI
BOINCing since 2002/12/8

edit: This does not mean that I think we should stop looking, if we do not look we definately will not find anything. Rather we need to have the patience to keep looking for centuries.

That's assuming "they" aren't the least bit interested in finding us as well. Personally, I view humans as being extremely primitive. I'm assuming a super-advanced society of aliens would possess technology and abilities that not only surpass our own, but surpass our ability to even imagine them. Let's say that we are chimps, and the aliens are humans. Like chimps, we'd be capable of interacting and communicating with humans - but it would require "their" prompting. By maintaining a serious search (through SETI, for example), I believe we're conveying a benevolent desire for interaction. Aliens, assuming they were advanced enough to reach us, would hopefully recognize this - and react accordingly. Perhaps the very fact that we're looking will trigger their interest in our planet - despite their vast superiority.

Perhaps the very fact that we're looking will trigger their interest in our planet - despite their vast superiority.

Maybe. It would certainly trigger a mass interest in looking for them if we knew that aliens were looking for us.

But we will look for them none-the-less because it is in our nature. We might be on the only planet supporting life in the universe, we might not. It is in our nature to find out, and not just to look through scopes, but to travel out there to find out, which we will. Thatâ€™s for certain.flamingballoons

It could be awhile. It seems that the aliens could have said or done something to humanity at least since Christ, and maybe before, but I haven't seen or heard anything about any extraterrestrial manifestation except flying saucers which may have been made up by humans or were really something else like toy airplanes, military stuff, out-of-focus images, etc. Looking for subtle radio waves is probably best, something impossible in the past centuries (except the 20th)/millennia (except the second AD).

Currently we are looking away from the center of the galaxy, if we looked towards the center we would have a much better, thousands, millions of times better chance.

Need some serious scopes in the southern hemisphere.

My guess is never. :( Hope I'm wrong.

First, it is not quite true that we are only looking away from the center of the galaxy. Take a look at the picture on THIS PAGE. The area of that picture which is "bright blue" in color is the galactic plane. As you can see, the purple tracks of where the data was collected from Aricebo cross the galactic plane in two places. Those are the places which have the most stars; a lot more than when the telescope points in other directions.

Now, as it says on THIS PAGE, the galactic center is located at Right ascension 17 : 45.6 (h : m) and Declination -28 : 56 (deg : m). So, I will agree that the galactic center is only viewable by a southern hemisphere telescope. (It is the bright blue glob located at about 18H and -30 on the picture on THIS PAGE.) But still, even from the northern hemisphere we still get close, and when we are in that band of stars that goes up from the galactic center, we are looking through stars that strike a chord across one side of the galaxy that goes near to the galactic center. Those stars go all the way across the galaxy, which is to say at least 40,000 light years worth of stars, many of which are much nearer the galactic center than we are.

So, yes, it will be nice to have the new scope in the Andes, but I don't think a SETI receiver is in their program. {sigh}

The real problem is that Earth has had radio technology for only about 100 years, and the further away from Earth you go, the more "ahead of us" the prospective transmitting star needs to be. When the light (or radio waves) left the furthest away galactic stars we can see, it would have been at least 40,000 years ago, and that was when mankind was still chasing girls into caves with wooden clubs (or some such cliche as that). So, even if that star 40,000 light years away from us had a civilization that was 10,000 years ahead of ours, we would still not expect to receive any radio waves from them because those waves would not get here for at least 30,000 more years.

And while mankind has had at least an agricultural civilization for 10-15,000 years, it is only in the past 100 years that we started emitting radio waves at a strength that just might get detected. But, to this day, none that would be recognized by a similar SETI project on even a fairly-local equivalent planet.

My guess would be that we will not make a serious dent in the probabilities until we can afford to search a much broader spectrum for a matter of at least hundreds of years.

Based upon that, my guess would be that we need to wait at least 1,000 years before we will have a reasonable shot at picking up an ET-created signal using a SETI-type approach.